About Leaders of Today
Everyone kept telling me I was a leader of tomorrow
I was already doing the work. So were the people around me. Leaders of Today is the platform I built so that finding your next opportunity stops depending on who you happen to know. It is free, it is used in 172 countries, and it started with a message from someone I barely knew.
I was fifteen and already doing the work
At fifteen I started a nonprofit in the women's health space. It began as a school project and it ended up reaching about twenty-five thousand people across ten countries, run by teenagers, out of Mombasa.
What I remember most is how hard it was to scale any of it. Not the idea. The idea was fine. Everything around it: the money, the contacts, the people who had already done it and could have told us which parts were going to break.
Nobody at fifteen thinks of themselves as a leader. But we were doing the work, and every adult in the room kept calling us the leaders of tomorrow, which is a very kind way of asking someone to wait their turn.
Then one person sent me a message
When I was seventeen, someone I barely knew messaged me about a programme called Global Teen Leader. I applied, I got in, and a few months later I was in a room in New York with people doing the work I wanted to do. That same year I won the Diana Award. For a long time I told all of that as a story about me.
It is not. It is a story about one person deciding to send one message, and if they had not sent it, none of the rest of this happens.
What I kept running into afterwards were the same three gaps, over and over, and not just for me. Opportunities you could actually find and actually apply for. Anyone who had done it before and would tell you how it really worked. And other people your own age who were building things, so that none of it felt quite so much like shouting into an empty room.
The first experiment was a podcast
Mentorship was the gap I went at first, because it looked like the one I could solve on my own. The people who had built the things I wanted to build were not at my school and not in my city, so I started asking them for an hour on camera, and to my genuine surprise most of them said yes. That was the first thing to carry the name Leaders of Today.
Some of those conversations went out and a lot of them never did, and by the end I understood why. Hearing someone describe how they found their opportunity is a good hour. It is not the same as being able to go and apply for one. I wanted the thing you could act on.
So I made the list
The opportunities were out there. Finding them was the problem. The places that listed them were covered in adverts, or sat behind a payment, or had not been updated in three years, and the good ones stayed invisible unless you already knew they existed.
I was doing that search for myself anyway, so I put everything I found into a spreadsheet and made it public, and it was opened more than three million times.
Then people started asking to be told when it changed, so it became a newsletter, and that is when the thing I had not planned for turned up. The people arriving were looking for opportunities, obviously. But mostly they were looking for each other.
A spreadsheet is not a home
So we built the platform. A person reads every opportunity before anyone else sees it, and anything that charges a young person a fee to apply gets thrown out.
None of that would have happened on its own. It happened because an organisation that funds this kind of work decided to back it, which is the same thing that happened to me at seventeen, at a different scale.
Where it is now
Young people in a hundred and seventy-two countries use this to work out what to apply for next, and the catalogue is checked every day.
The job now is the reverse of where it started. Instead of helping you find the opportunity, making the opportunity find you.
The team
Our leadership team
Ziyaan Virji
Co-founder and CEO
I was born in Dar es Salaam and went to school in Mombasa on a scholarship, then to university in Vancouver on another one, which was called the International Leader of Tomorrow Award. I have been building in this space since I was fifteen, which is most of my life at this point. I run Leaders of Today from Toronto.
Zohra Dewji
Co-founder and COO
Zohra spent her early career inside one of the largest banks in North America, on the app millions of people open every day and on its first AI work. She left to point that same standard of engineering at the people who are usually last in line for it. She designs the systems that let a company this small work at this scale, and she is the reason it holds together.
The model
Why it is free
Leaders of Today is free for every young person who uses it, and it stays that way. The people who need it most are the least able to pay for it, so putting a price on it would defeat the point. The work is funded by the organisations that want to reach young people, through listings, campaigns, and their own branded versions of the platform, and by grant funding alongside that.
None of this would exist without Aga Khan Foundation Canada, who backed the platform first.
Our long term vision
Finding an opportunity is one piece of something much bigger. Around every young person there are the organisations running the programmes, the teachers and counsellors pointing them at the right ones, and the funders paying for all of it to exist, and right now none of those groups can really see each other. We work with the first two. The intention is to work with all of them, and to use AI for the part that has never scaled, which is knowing that a particular person should see a particular thing at a particular moment.
Where we work todayWhere we intend to
Leaders of Today is part of Today Labs, which builds AI infrastructure for organisations in the sectors that need it most.
Straight answers
Questions people ask
Is Leaders of Today free?
Yes, for every young person, with no paid tier and no trial. Organisations pay to reach young people. Young people never pay to be reached.
Who runs Leaders of Today?
Ziyaan Virji founded it. He and Zohra Dewji run it, together with the rest of the team, from Toronto, Canada.
When did Leaders of Today start?
The name has been in use since late 2020. The opportunities list that became this platform went out in October 2023, and the platform itself opened in November 2025.
How do you decide what gets listed?
A person reads every opportunity before it appears. Anything that charges a young person a fee to apply is refused.
Who is it for?
Young people up to the age of 30, anywhere in the world. It is used in 172 countries.
How is it funded?
Organisations pay to reach young people, and grant funding covers part of the work. The platform was built with funding from Aga Khan Foundation Canada, in partnership with the Government of Canada.
Next
Wherever you have come from
Looking for something to apply for?
Here is what is open right now.
See opportunitiesIf you run an organisationHave an opportunity you want young people to find?
Here is how that works.
For organisationsIf you are anyone elseSomething else on your mind?
We would like to hear it.
Get in touch